Week 10- Bus Stop Safety Research

Over the past week I've been researching incidents in which vehicles hit bus stops and to a lesser extent incidents in which people have been assaulted at bus stops (this is less widely covered and reported). I won't copy the annotated bibliography here due to size but this is an issue that has been happening since I moved to Las Vegas in 2002.

I wonder how often non-fatalities are covered, as I found that a vehicular collision that I'd seen the aftermath of (it was around 10:30pm on a Friday night a few months ago) wasn't even covered in the news. No one was injured but somehow a vehicle went right over the bench and then the mesh back of a bus stop on Tropicana between Spencer and Eastern. I'm not sure how the vehicle managed to do that, as there were no turns or perpendicular roads nearby.

I've also been taking photos of both ideal and problematic bus stops but will probably start using Google Street View as I don't want to take photos of strangers at a bus stop and most have people waiting at them.

One car-centric quote from an RTC official made me wonder how many higher ups at the RTC actually take the bus. “Scarbrough also said local roads, away from the Strip, are different as cars travel faster and this can cause more impact on a driver potentially hitting a bollard. "More than half of our bus stops are on roadways that are 45 mph or higher, and speed limits on the Strip are much lower," Scarbrough said.” 

Call me callous, but I'd much rather an irresponsible driver who hits a bollard going 45 mph be injured or die than for them to plow through a less solid mass of bodies and bus stop mesh and survive.